Petraeus Team: Taliban Made Us Wipe Village Out [Updated]

Expect more Afghan villages to be destroyed by American rockets and bombs — if, that is, the Taliban “saturate” them with homemade explosives and kick out the villagers. But the U.S.-led coalition isn’t going to destroy populated areas, says a spokesman for Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the Afghanistan war.

Paula Broadwell reported for Tom Ricks’ blog last week that coalition forces used 25 tons of munitions to demolish the ostensibly depopulated village of Tarok Kolache in October. The place was a Taliban stronghold, according to the commander of Combined Joint Task Force 1-320th: packed with homemade bombs, and devoid of civilians. So the 1-320th wiped it off the map.

“These are whole neighborhoods that are empty of people and are booby-trapped. it’s whole neighborhoods, it’s not the one odd house,” Petraeus spokesman Col. Erik Gunhus tells Danger Room. U.S. troops are finding more of these explosive-laden areas as they fight through southern Afghanistan, he adds — meaning that their destruction is ultimately the Taliban’s fault.

“We’re being forced into these things,” he says. “We’re not the ones rigging houses or kicking families out of their homes in the middle of winter.”

Danger Room raised questions yesterday about how the 1-320th knew for sure that it didn’t kill any civilians, as it didn’t clear the village ahead of the bombardment. Gunhus declined to talk about Tarok Kolache in significant detail. But he said generically that when troops encounter villages filled with improvised explosive devices, they’ll have “stacked” information from surveillance eyes overhead and local villagers on the ground convincing them that civilians aren’t present before they “reduce” an area.

“We had to reduce the city because it was rigged,” Gunhus says. “It was saturated with IEDs meant to harm [NATO] forces. There were no citizens in the town.” Gunhus adds that meetings with Afghan villagers and leaders after “reducing” bomb-rigged villages allows civilians to receive compensation — as well as inform U.S. troops if their relatives have been injured. As far as he’s aware, that didn’t happen in Tarok Kolache.

The expansion of U.S. surge troops into southern areas where they didn’t fight before has led to more discoveries of bomb-“saturated” and depopulated villages, and to a choice by commanders to blast them away. But Petraeus explicitly warned his troops against heavy-handed tactics in August. “Hunt the enemy aggressively, but use only the firepower needed to win a fight,” he wrote in a memo on counterinsurgency guidelines:

Tarok Kolache might be an extreme example. But throughout the fall and winter — after the village’s destruction — reports surfaced that in the bloody fight for Kandahar, the U.S. military began destroying homes it believed to be riddled with Taliban bombs. In the Arghandab village of Khosrow, The New York Times reported, “every one” of the 40 homes was “flattened” by missiles, part of what the district governor estimated to be 120 to 130 Arghandab home demolitions.

But the governor, appointed by Hamid Karzai, defended the destruction, saying, “There was no other way; we knew people wanted us to get rid of all these deadly [homemade bombs].” The houses were reported to be empty, and funds have been established to compensate their owners.

In an apparent reference to the Tarok Kolache bombardment, The Washington Post recently reported that “U.S. aircraft dropped about two dozen 2,000-pound bombs” near Kandahar City in October, prompting a resident to ask a NATO general, “Why do you have to blow up so many of our fields and homes?” That same piece described the decision to send tanks to southern Afghanistan, part of what one military officer described as a display of “awe, shock and firepower.”

Some human rights researchers are of two minds about the demolitions. “On the one hand, it’s horrifying to see this level of property destruction, but on the other hand, from a civilian-protection standpoint, it’s not great to leave these booby-trapped towns in the state that the Taliban left them,” e-mails Erica Gaston, an Afghanistan-based researcher for the Open Society Institute. “Given the way in which the IEDs and other explosives have been planted (often wired into the walls of houses), defusing them by other means would likely be incredibly risky and not feasible for a very long time. There’s no easy answer.”

Clearing the houses of their explosive riggings without bombing them would likely mean U.S. or allied casualties — prompting the choice that the 1-320th made, Gunhus says. “It comes down to, intellectually, do you level a town where no one’s living that would take you probably days and you’d probably lose some people, or do you level it and then rebuild it? Intellectually, I think it makes sense.”

On Ricks’ blog — where the original Tarok Kolache report appeared — 1-320th commander Lt. Col. David Flynn responds to some of the criticism he’s received about Tarok Kolache. His response mainly addresses claims of impunity for his Afghan security counterparts after Joshua Foust called them into question, and not his actual operations in the village.

The U.S.-based “orator” Foust, Flynn writes, “lacks the context to editorialize in a way that enables his readers to ascertain an objective view.” (You can also read an exchange between Foust and Andrew Exum about the tactics Flynn employed.)

Update, 2:20 p.m.: Mea culpa for not seeing this earlier, but Stars & Stripes’ Megan McCloskey wrote a great piece on Tarok Kolache in December. She witnessed Petraeus, without body armor, speak to an assembly of displaced village farmers — several of whom used to be “extremely angry” at the destruction, according to a fire-support officer she quoted — and pledge ISAF support for reconstruction. Among Petraeus’ interlocutors was the village elder, who approached the general “with a broad smile.”

Also, Broadwell posts on her Facebook wall that she met with the village elder (presumably the same one who talked to Petraeus in December) to get “the scoop on the village razing…. Story to follow.”

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